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U.S. took steps to avoid devastation that struck Britain

Americans rarely eat the most suspect beef parts, and animal-derived feed is banned in this country.

LONDON - Britain's experience with mad cow disease over nearly 20 years has been traumatic - the deaths of 143 people, millions of cattle slaughtered and burned, the nation's beef industry devastated.

The brain-wasting illness called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the first U.S. case of which was reported Tuesday, is thought to have emerged in Britain in the 1970s.

Scientists are still studying the precise origins and effect of BSE and the related human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which can take up to 20 years to develop.

British scientists first identified BSE in 1986. The disease rampaged through dairy and cattle herds in the mid 1990s and forced the government to order a mass slaughter. The public view of the disease was shaped by TV film of infected animals staggering wildly and collapsing.

British politicians at first tried to play down the problem, eating hamburgers in front of the media to show their trust in British beef.

But as the number of human cases and deaths grew, beef exports plummeted. The European Union banned Britain from exporting beef and feed in 1996.

The British government banned the sale of meat on the bone and tightened slaughter methods.

BSE is thought to have developed in the 1970s as a variant of scrapie, an ancient sheep disease. It appears to have spread in the late 1980s and 1990s to cattle given feed containing infected meat and bone.

A link was established by scientists in 1996 between BSE and vCJD, a fatal crippling of the human nervous system. Variant CJD has killed 153 people - all but 10 in Britain.

Experts believe vCJD comes from eating products from cows infected with BSE.

British experts say American farmers are better placed to deal with BSE because they have adopted safeguards from Europe.

Unlike people in the United States, where grains and soybeans are cheap and plentiful, Europeans rely much more heavily on slaughterhouse waste to boost the protein content of animal fodder. Cow and sheep byproducts - a major source of BSE transmission - are banned as animal feed in the United States.

Also, Americans eat fewer byproducts such as offal and brains, which are popular in Europe and are thought to be the most likely parts to cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Sean Ricard, a former chief economist of Britain's National Farmers' Union, said the American case may be an isolated one that can be quickly contained with little or no further damage.

Speaking to the BBC, he suggested that picking up a random case shows the American system works.

Scientists are still trying to determine the full extent of what happened in Britain.

When the disease first struck, some predicted up to 100,000 people in Britain could die. Recent research by Britain's scientific academy forecasts that as few as 10 and as many as 7,000 could get the illness by 2080.